Okay, I found this amusing on a Friday afternoon at the office.
A colleague of mine, an Indian woman who speaks with quite a heavy accent, just hung up the phone and complained loudly that she was forwarded to a customer service center where the person on the phone barely spoke any legible english and could not help her with the problem. Another colleague, sitting next to her who is also Indian, commented that “The company must be cutting down on costs with their outsourced call center.”
Entire exchange was conducted with straight faces.
I’m not making fun of them. They are both quite lovely and capable IT professionals. But I’m still all about it. Is that wrong?
Are there major differences in regional accent in India that could cause this? India’s a pretty big country and I can imagine that the situation might have been sort of like what happens when a born-and-bred Californian suddenly finds themselves in a small farming community in Alabama and suddenly can’t figure out what anyone is talking about. Same country, same language. Or, maybe they really were joking around.
I once had a conf call with a client in Egypt & our programers, who were in India. The call was in English, but they couldn’t understand each others accent so I had to translate from Egyptian-accented English to Indian-accented English & vice-versa.
A consultant from India bragged during his introduction to our IT department (“Hey, tell us something interesting about your non-geek life!”) that he was teaching himself 5 different languages – Urdu, Telegu, Sanskrit, Punjabi, and Gujarati - in addition to the two (English and Hindi) he already knew.*
I’m rather anti-imperialist, but one of the relatively positive things the British did when they set up the East India Company to prevent the sun from setting over the Queen’s empire was to force everyone across the land – particularly those whom they tapped to help with running the operations – to learn and use one common language: English.#
—G!
That left me too embarrassed to note that I had spent several semesters (each) studying Spanish, Russian, and Japanese, plus dabbled in French and Farsi.
Then again, teaching everyone that English led to their own undoing.:smack:
about it. Is that wrong?